Articles

Programmatically Creating a Tiny URL from bit.ly
URL-Shortening sites are very common these days. This article shows how your application can generate a tiny URL automatically by requesting the shortened URL from bit.ly.
By Jonathan Wood •
Created on Friday, March 4, 2011

Reading and Writing CSV Files in C#
An easy way to share data with programs like Microsof Excel is to read and write Comma-Separated Values (CSV) files.
By Jonathan Wood •
Updated on Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Using Ajax.BeginForm() with ASP.NET MVC
ASP.NET MVC's Html.BeginForm() provides a handy shortcut for creating forms in your view. This article describes using Ajax.BeginForm(), which brings the same type of shortcut for implementing forms that post using AJAX.
By Jonathan Wood •
Created on Saturday, April 21, 2012

Converting Text to HTML
Here's a simple routine that will format a string as HTML so that it can be displayed on a web page. It extends the functionality offered by the HttpUtility.HtmlEncode() method.
By Jonathan Wood •
Created on Thursday, March 31, 2011

Writing a Custom HTTP Handler in ASP.NET
Time was, you had to delve into a number of IIS settings to implement a custom HTTP handler. Thanks to ASP.NET 4 and IIS7, this is no longer the case.
By Jonathan Wood •
Updated on Saturday, January 22, 2011

Parsing HTML Tags in C#
Here's some code that will parse the tags in an HTML page. Perfect for tasks like finding all the out-going links on a page.
By Jonathan Wood •
Updated on Friday, December 31, 2010

A C# Expression Evaluator
This article presents C# code to evaluate mathematical expressions. Although I've seen some interesting techniques to accomplish this through various libraries and system calls, my approach was to simply write the code from scratch.
By Jonathan Wood •
Created on Sunday, December 26, 2010

Convert HTML to Text
I recently wrote about converting plain text to HTML. Here's some code to convert HTML back to plain text. This code should come in handy for any situation where you need to extract plain text from the Web.
By Jonathan Wood •
Created on Tuesday, April 5, 2011

An ADO.NET SQL Helper Class
Technologies like Entity Framework are cool, but accessing ADO.NET directly is still a little faster. For developers still using plain old ADO.NET to query SQL Server databases, here's a helper class to reduce the amount of typing required.
By Jonathan Wood •
Created on Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Prevent User Navigating Away from Page with Unsaved Changes
When a user is editing data on a web page and they navigate to another page before saving that data, their changes will be lost. Here's some handy jQuery to warn the user any time they attempt to navigate to another page with unsaved changes and give them the option of staying on the current page to save those changes.
By Jonathan Wood •
Created on Saturday, August 6, 2011